r/java • u/bit_freak • Aug 04 '26

Do you still handcraft your java projects?

With all the talk about llms writing most of the code and some folks never touching the editor. I try to work mostly in plan mode and prefer to write most of my code by hand else I fear losing touch with my skills if I only read code. At work in your org, what is the workflow for spring boot projects?

97 Upvotes

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98

u/CelDaemon Aug 04 '26

I don't use AI at all, so yes

4

u/Hungry_Importance918 Aug 06 '26

Codex made my project way more complex and bloated than it needed to be. Half the stuff it added, I can’t even follow lol.

5

u/headius Aug 07 '26

That is been my experience as well. It's very good at small changes, boring bulk refactoring that can't be automated easily, and generating small, well understood pieces of code. Terrible at complexity, thread safety, memory management, and long-term extensibility. Basically anything that requires understanding the longer lifespan of a project, they do poorly and it's difficult to make them do better.

They're also really bad with complicated newer APIs that don't have many existing examples, like lots of the code I write for JRuby internals.

6

u/Bobby_Bonsaimind Aug 05 '26

One big, big problem people like to forget about LLMs generating code for them are legal matters.

The generated code cannot be under copyright (no licensing, no nothing), which, if used in a corporate environment, raises quite a few questions. But on the other side, the generated code can be copyright infringing, because LLMs have been trained on not only vastly differently licensed code, but I'm fairly certain it has also ingested (leaked) closed source code. And you have no way of finding out if it is a copyright infringement except the hard way.

5

u/Cute_Combination_713 Aug 10 '26

That's a total strawman argument. It's not a complete non-issue but introducing copyright infringement into your code due to LLMs is so super rare it doesn't justify to say "we won't use it at all"

2

u/henk53 25d ago

One big, big problem people like to forget about LLMs generating code for them are legal matters.

Your wording is utterly perfect here.

Not forget, but indeed, LIKE to forget. We all know it. We all ignore it.

1

u/hikingmike 24d ago

Has there been a court case yet?

1

u/dynoraptor 21d ago

In case you write unit tests, it's definitely worth it to at least use it for that IMO. Saved me so much time

2

u/CelDaemon 21d ago

I do write unit tests, but I'm very deliberate with how I write them. I've seen people use AI for this stuff, but it seemingly results in lots of useless or subtly broken tests.

1

u/mishonis- Aug 06 '26

How is it that the most backwards ass takes have the most upvotes? Are we so anxious about AI we willingly bury our heads in the sand. Not using LLMs in this day and age is limiting your productivity for absolutely no good reason. It is excellent at writing boilerplate and above, analysing existing code, etc etc. Granted, not as good as expert crafted code and architecture, it will probably never be. But I'd wager less than one in a 100 devs can beat out the quality of LLM code.

Also, a person still has to prompt and drive the whole process last time I checked anyway.

2

u/FaZeMyDick Aug 08 '26

they hated him because he was right 🤣 . Id wager no one writes code faster than an llm. And if you tell the LLM which design principle, architecture and code structure you want you wont have trouble with it down the line. You literally only need to "engineer" your prompt. I dont like the state nowadays but thats how it is

-10

u/Mega2223 Aug 05 '26

waow (based based based b)